U.S. Sisters in Crisis after Embracing “Secular Culture”: Vatican Cardinal

Some religious orders in the U.S. and most western countries are in a state of “modern crisis” because the members of the order have embraced “secular culture” and abandoned traditional religious practices, the head of the Vatican’s office for religious life has said.

But, said the cardinal, the religious life in the Catholic Church should be presenting an alternative to the “dominant culture,” “which is a culture of death, of violence and of abuse,” rather than mirroring it.

Cardinal Franc Rodé, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, which is undertaking a review (known as a “visitation”) of the active religious life for women in the U.S., was speaking to a conference on religious life sponsored by the Archdiocese of Naples on Wednesday.

He said, “The crisis experienced by certain religious communities, especially in Western Europe and North America, reflects the more profound crisis of European and American society. All this has dried up the sources that for centuries have nourished consecrated and missionary life in the church.”

“The secularized culture has penetrated into the minds and hearts of some consecrated persons and some communities, where it is seen as an opening to modernity and a way of approaching the contemporary world,” the cardinal added.

In November last year, Cardinal Rodé forthrightly said that it is feminism that has created the crisis in the religious orders. In an interview with Vatican Radio, he said he had been “alerted” by an unnamed representative of the Church in the U.S., “to some irregularities or deficiencies” in the way the religious sisters were living.

“Above all, you could speak of a certain secularist mentality that has spread among these religious families, perhaps even a certain ‘feminist’ spirit,” the cardinal said.

Late last year, the increasingly loud complaints about the ongoing visitation from a small number of American communities prompted several public comments from the cardinal defending the Vatican’s decision to investigate the sisters’ lives. For some years now, Rodé has called on the sisters to refocus their communities on the “founding charisms” or original purpose of their orders.

The deterioration since the 1960s into radical feminism and leftist politics of most of the religious orders in the U.S., especially those of women, has not gone unnoticed in Rome. In 2008 at a meeting of religious men and women in Boston, Cardinal Rodé said that today there are some in religious life “who have chosen paths that have carried them away from communion with Christ in the Catholic Church, even though they have decided to physically ‘be’ in the Church.”

This assertion was bolstered in 2007 at a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a keynote speaker, Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, said that the more liberal congregations of sisters were leaving behind “institutional religion” and “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus.”

What she called a “sojourning” order “is no longer ecclesiastical,” she said. “Religious titles, institutional limitations, ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is Post-Christian.”

These statements were cited by the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) when it launched a doctrinal investigation into the beliefs and teachings of orders that are members of LCWR. The Apostolic Visitation being conducted by the Congregation for Religious is separate from the CDF investigation, but the latter has been excoriated as an “inquisition” by the same religious orders that have objected to the Visitation.

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Now that the Vatican has identified the problem, what are they going to DO about it??? It’s a horrible scandal.

faithful2christ

Dear Lucky Mom of 7:

It is not so much what the Holy See is going to DO about it but what are the so-called “religious” women of the United States and the Western World is WILLING to do to regain, recommit and walk more closely to the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Church on Earth! We have a crisis in the “west” and these Women Religious Orders (if you want to call it an “order”) are more focused on the way of the world then the charism of their founders.

It is not that they wear the full gear habit as much as they seek that which makes them religious and holy (set apart from this world). As long as these women tell others “I am like you except I don’t get married” is much of a call to be HOLY and SET APART to do the mission of Jesus Christ and His Holy Roman Catholic Church. Enough of the worldly compromises and trying to “fit” in but a real commitment to be wholely different and set apart and not just like one of us (the laity) although they do come from us.

fatherjo

It’s not just the ones in pant suits and butch hairdos, either. I’ve been trying to get nuns in habit for my parish for over a year now. A Pastor is lucky to get a response to a letter from these birds. One Mother Superior finally wrote me back after six months. She was so condescending and patronizing I thanked God we didn’t have to be burdened with her group.

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